


favors

by i_am_therefore_i_fight



Series: beautiful villains [1]
Category: Disney - All Media Types, Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Genre: Food Horror, Gen, Horror, black magic, disability used as a curse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 11:40:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7713586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_am_therefore_i_fight/pseuds/i_am_therefore_i_fight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only civilized form of revenge, obviously, is to throw another feast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	favors

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The revenge of Maleficent takes the form of a dinner party.

Come, she says, and let me show you how etiquette should be practiced. Come, and see what a gracious host I am. Come, so that you might understand the mistake you’ve made.

It would have been an even greater mistake to reject her invitation. So they go, the whole court, the King and Queen and their infant daughter, and all the fairies who laid magic upon her and blessed her with gifts, all of them go to Maleficent’s feast.

At the beginning of the meal she makes a toast. Gifts await all of the attendees, she says, party favors to be handed out at the end, her little way of saying ‘thank you for coming.’

Oh, and one more thing, she says. No one is allowed to leave until they have received their gift. It’s only good manners.

They eat of dishes they do not recognize. The Queen, growing deathly paler by the mouthful, whispers direly to her husband that the crow perched on the back of the chair opposite won’t stop looking at her, and the King plucks a black feather from his plate and removes it without a word. At least it’s not a mouse tail, he thinks, eyes fixed on the courtier a few seats down who fainted after finding the thing still wriggling among his vegetables.

Maleficent insists that they all take seconds, then thirds. It isn’t polite to refuse, she says. It isn’t polite to leave food on your plate. It isn’t polite to beg for permission to stop. It isn’t polite to burst into tears at the table.

Finally, much quiet weeping that her cold and pointed stares have not entirely silenced, Maleficent rises. It is time, she says, to hand out party favors.

For the King, the gift of blindness, and of deafness, that he might never live to see his daughter grow; that the sound of her name might fade from his memory, that he might never have knowledge of her face.

For the Queen, she gives senselessness; eternal cold, numb hands and lips, that she might never knows the child’s weight in her arms, might never feel the warmth of love when she looks upon her, only the emptiness and the cold.

To the baby princess she gives a paralyzed body, that she may live and grow in physical form but not in mind or character. Awake but helpless, she will live without living, and be unable to even close her eyes and shut out the world beyond the prison of her body.

And to the other fairies, her sisters, she gives heavy bodies - hands made of clay and dumb mouths that can pronounce no incantations, that cannot so much as speak their own names, too clumsy for the language of the Fey. She wraps them in a layer of dead skin and says, I have given you a garment; and may you never shed it for as long as you live. This is my gift.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at i-am-therefore-i-fight.tumblr.com/post/148407401192.


End file.
